


The Long Kiss

by smug_rabbit



Category: Persona 3, Persona Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-05-03 00:10:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 6,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14556618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smug_rabbit/pseuds/smug_rabbit
Summary: Minato made lots of friends in one year at Tatsumi Port Island. Saying goodbye is the hardest part of all. Set post-game, spoilers for March 2010 and various Social Links.





	1. In Memory Of...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers for Maiko's Social Link.

 

“Please, Mom? It’s really important.”

Her mother doesn’t slow the pace of her vegetable-cutting, though Maiko also notices the knife doesn’t come down as hard as it used to. It hadn't, since the divorce. “Graveyards are no place for a young girl. Whoever you want to visit, they’re not important enough that we need to depress ourselves.”

“Remember when I ran away from home, and you asked a boy at the shrine to find me?”

“Oh.” Her mother’s shoulders slump. She still doesn’t like being reminded of that incident.

“Please?”

The doorbell rings. Mother’s new boyfriend was home from work. The knife clatters in the sink as her mom stomps over to the door, a scowl forming on her face.

“Fine. Don’t tell Dad.”

 

 


	2. 40 oz. Déjà vu

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers for Mutatsu's Social Link.

It is way past Club Escapade’s usual closing time, but its garish pink neon lights are still flickering and buzzing loud enough to exacerbate Mutatsu’s pounding migraine. Nevertheless, he is also grateful that they are bright enough to keep him awake long enough to find a bit of the floor that isn’t coated in the usual mix of alcohol and the vomit from the last drunken salarymen stumbling their way out of the building. One of said salarymen - a narrow-faced giant with a crew-cut, brandishing a beer bottle - slips on the foul mixture as he passes Mutatsu. Physics wrenches the beer bottle out of his grip, sending drops of alcohol splashing onto Mutatsu’s suit. The salaryman topples over onto his back and does not get up, groaning all the while. Mutatsu doesn’t care; he’s too busy cursing as he prods the soaked patches on his clothes. That will be sticky in a few minutes unless he gets some water onto it. He is tempted to dunk himself in the nearby fountain, but finesse is beyond Mutatsu in his current state, and he is lucid enough to realise he might fall in and never come back out. Damned salarymen were the most irresponsible with their drinks. This happened so often, back when he lurched himself to this club every other day.

 _“So why put yourself through that again?”_ Minato would undoubtedly ask.

“Because I needed something when I heard you was dead. You should be damn thankful that you were important enough for me to honour you.” Mutatsu musters enough strength to raise his bottle to the mall’s roof before overturning the remnants of his beer onto the floor. The puddle turns into a stream, joining the rest of the budding swamp outside the club’s entrance. “That’s for you, kid, and those glorious days. When this old man was learning from you to make the most of life before it ends. Not to sound too selfish, but even after all our talks, it was you-” Mutatsu swallows – “Dyin’ what nailed that message home.”

In his drunken state, he can see the ephemeral outline of Minato in his school uniform, drifting in and out of his vision. He reaches a hand out to pat the figure’s shoulder, but he blinks out of existence, and Mutatsu pitches forward over his knees. His dulled senses tell him that his forehead is glued to the sticky floor. A small part of his consciousness untouched by the alcohol whispers this is undignified, this is no way for a monk who’d promised himself he’d be a teetotaller for the rest of his life if it meant getting back with his wife and kid, that Minato would be ashamed if he could see Mutatsu now. The monk’s boozed mind pays it no heed. Mutatsu is entitled to have one last drunken conversation with the kid.

“Conversation? Nah, it’s always me lecturing you all the time. You need to participate more for that shit to be called a conversation.” He laughs, pulling his skull off the floor to face the phantom Minato, sitting cross-legged alongside him, hunched over and mouthing a protest. “I’m not sorry at all. It’s the truth. You’ll never get a girl by being too quiet.”

“Yeah, I got no right to complain. I suppose it shows that you’re a good listener. Respectful. And that's a good thing for old men, 'cause old men need to rant at someone, with someone, without some upstart shit being all patronising with the 'yes, gramps, no gramps, you told us already, gramps'. It’s no good, getting old with nobody to talk to. You go crazy, harassing strangers and shit like that, just so you can see folks staring back at you. Doesn’t matter if they look at you like you’re weird or ugly. They just look at you, and you know that you still exist in this world.”

The crew-cut businessman, still lying spread-eagled on the ground, lifts up his head. “Like this?" He shoots Mutatsu a disdainful glare, whose effect is tempered by the bleariness in his eyes. "You my dad now?”

The phantom Minato slips out of his peripheral vision for a moment as Mutatsu rolls his eyes at the eavesdropper. Even the act of moving sends his head into a spin, and by the time Mutatsu focuses his gaze again, Minato is gone.

Mutatsu kicks the bottle towards the fountain in the middle of the mall where it comes to a rest with a final clink.

“Wherever you are, smile upon me, okay?” he shouts as loud as he can.

“Yeah, sure,” the businessman snorts behind him. Mutatsu doesn’t care. Derision is how Mutatsu knows he’s still alive.


	3. They Reminisce Over You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers for Kenji's Social Link.

It isn't a cheap or pathetic gesture as Kenji thought when he first came up with it. The best memories he ever shared with Minato were behind two bowls of Hagakure ramen.

"One takeaway bowl of ramen, soaked in Hagakure’s classic broth."

Kenji bows his head before placing the plastic bowl at the foot of Minato’s dormitory door, nudging it with his foot towards the other assorted items placed by admirers and friends; the bento boxes, a kendo stick, a paintbrush, and a _teru teru bozu_.

"Wish you were here, man." He turns to Yuko and Bebe beside him, looking equally glum. "This was one of my best friends. Always had advice."

He tells that to his schoolmates so often these days, it almost sounds like bragging. Left out is all the jealousy; Minato the class genius, the kendo champ, the artist, the junior soccer manager, the one who stays in that dormitory with Takeba and Aigis and the Empress and the underrated Yamagishi. Meanwhile, Kenji is unremarkable to the point he sometimes wonders what he exists for, aside from pursuing failed romances with his teachers. There were days where he would have killed to be Minato Arisato, who is now dead at seventeen, and whose room is still waiting for its occupant to return as it bathes in white, then yellow, then red light, before the sun crawls over the horizon yet again and Kenji can barely make out the outline of Minato’s room.

Minato doesn’t come back today, either. He does not stagger through the door, disinterested yet quick-witted. Neither does the dishevelled, gaunt figure that Kenji saw mere minutes before it climbed atop the roof to die. Kenji daydreams - a skill he has had no shortage of time to practice - about what he would have done if he’d been next to Minato in those final moments, instead of cowering from his sister in the school’s toilets.

And Kenji daydreams about what he could have done differently beyond March, all the way back to last year, how he could’ve been a better friend instead of imposing all his hurt and scheming onto his classmate. There was Minato reassuring him, encouraging him to chase that teacher whose name he couldn’t remember. Minato balancing atop a ladder to hang banners advertising a school festival they never ended up hosting. A year of friendship, and he barely knew anything about what Minato liked or what he wanted to do with his life. It was only ever about Kenji and what Kenji should do over the next week.

Who was Arisato?

Kenji should’ve known. Schoolmates asked him about the Minato-kun that everyone knew about, the quiet boy who answered every question right whenever the teacher called on him, the one who topped the school rankings after their last exam.

But Kenji couldn’t answer beyond that meagre string of cold facts. Minato Arisato was the boy who got swept up in whatever school activity took his fancy, and became good at it. When Kenji was venting his feelings over his crush on teachers or classmates, Minato would listen without interruption. A good listener with good advice, who was good at everything. Perhaps that was all there was to him, really.

Kenji doesn’t feel so sad anymore, and he hates himself for it. He turns around, and sees that the others have already gone.


	4. I’m Gonna Live Long In This Game

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers for Tanaka's Social Link.

Tanaka brushes away the makeup artist applying the last bit of contour to his wrinkled cheeks. The technical crew scampers away from the video camera's lens, leaving Tanaka alone with the green screen and a distressed twenty-something intern hovering by his shoulder.

"You have one minute to explain why Arisato isn’t with you."

The intern shifts her pumps. “I’m sorry, President Tanaka. He’s dead, according to this report from his school.”

“He’s a young boy, not your age.”

She holds out a sheet with a hand shaking from equal parts anger and fear. Tanaka leans in to read it.

“Signed by the Kirijo heiress herself, hm?” His beady eyes run up and down the paper. “No specifics on how he died?”

“None, sir.”

Sudden heart failure, according to Kirijo’s report. Tanaka is not fool enough to believe that. But it is irrelevant. Natural causes or not, the boy isn’t going to be part of Tanaka’s business plans anymore.

“Shame. He would have made a good model to hawk products to the teenagers. He had a magnetic air about him, you know. Cold and cool.”

“I believe so too, sir.”

“You never met him, you toadying runt. I hate sycophants.”

“Sorry, sir.”

Loss and regret flicker through him, senses he hadn’t felt in a long time. Why had Arisato left such an impression on him? When they first met in the mall, he was merely another young sucker Tanaka had scammed with promises of stardom in exchange for a few thousand yen. But no matter how much Tanaka wheedled out of him at each visit, Arisato handed over the next payment with only a raised eyebrow. Even after Tanaka exposed his own scam out of pity, Arisato brushed off the loss as if he could see through it all along, and continued hanging around Tanaka, taking the opportunity to learn about the industry from its most unscrupulous trickster. An unhealthy slouch coupled with perpetually bleary-eyes typified everything wrong with this generation, not to mention the carelessness with money. Yet, unlike the starry-eyed enthusiasm of Tanaka's previous victims, Arisato's aura radiated a unique kind of quiet, self-assured energy. That would’ve been a great marketing tool, if only Tanaka had followed through on his promise.

“You’re live in thirty seconds, sir.” The blushing intern bows and takes her leave, her voice strained and eyebrows knotted together in suppressed fury. She hasn’t quite learned to brush off the abuse of corporate Japan, which means he can afford to keep her on the unpaid list for a few more weeks before she inevitably walks out. Arisato never took abuse so personally.

Forget it. This is no time for sentimentality. He has a business to run, a live show to air. The introspection and reflecting over a loss of a potential cash cow could come later, if he could remember why he was annoyed by the time of the next commercial break. He makes a mental note for the future: trust your instincts and seize potential young models for ad campaigns as soon as you spot them. Scamming them for the short-term dollar was a mistake he would never repeat again.

From that perspective, Minato’s death wasn’t a total waste. That was how business worked. You win some, you lose some, but you never lose the same way twice.

“We’re live in three, two, one-”

_Anata no, terebii ni, Jika-netto Tanaka-_

 


	5. The Lights Inside This Room Don't Flicker, Part 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place before The Answer.

“You’ll always be welcome back.”

Junpei appreciates Mitsuru’s sentiment. But in two days, the soles of his battle-worn sneakers will never set foot on the carpet of Minato’s room again.

“Too many memories here.”

“Well. Say goodbye to the others on your way out.”

“I still have until tomorrow before the movers come.”

Mitsuru nods, but he isn’t sure if she comprehended what he said.

“Excellent.”

Junpei fingers the band on his arm. Without looking at it, he yanks it off.

“I guess all that’s left is to return this.”

Mitsuru wordlessly plucks the SEES band from his hands. She doesn’t look at it either.

“What’s gonna happen to-?”

“Disbanded. With Tartarus gone, the Shadows’ threat to Iwatodai is reduced, but we know they’re still out in the world. The Kirijo Group’s executives are funding a specialised squad within one of our science divisions to combat them. Adults only.”

“Adults only,” Junpei echoes. SEES had done more Shadow-fighting than anyone else, and they’d lost more and invested more than anyone else had, or ever would.

“I’ll be in full control of the company within the year, age be damned.” She is angrier and more determined than he’d ever seen her since the battle with Nyx. “Once I bring the other executives to heel, I’ll establish my own anti-Shadow group. You’ll be invited once you’re done with school.”

“Fighting Shadows as a job, huh? I don’t think I could do that. Not after-” Junpei waves his hands at the walls of the room. Mitsuru scowls, and recognising his mistake, Junpei scrambles for something to distract from the stagnant air.

“What will you do with the room?”

Junpei runs his finger along the spine of Minato’s history textbook, neatly placed on the middle of the desk. He inspects the dust on his finger, and blows it off. The shards of dust soar through the air, some of it landing onto Mitsuru’s skirt. Luckily for him, she is too lost in thought to notice.

“Hm. I’d hate for the dorm to develop ghost stories. Though I suppose the Kirijo Group has experience with cover-ups. As for his belongings...” Mitsuru sighs, “They’ll be disposed of.”

Junpei shuffles his feet. “Get rid of his stuff…why?”

“We can’t keep his things in storage forever,” she snaps, and defiance flickers in her glazed eyes, in the briefest imitation of a Mitsuru he admired and feared, the one that stared down Ikutsuki a lifetime ago. “I’m not going to pick over his room like a vulture. That’s only going to hurt us in the long run, Iori.”

“He’s our friend.”

“Do you want anything of his?”

Of course he can’t take Mitsuru on her dare, not while she’s acting like this. But he promises silently to sneak in and take a memento of Minato before the movers arrived and carried Junpei away from here. All he needs is one small thing he could stuff into his boxes and carry home. What it is, he won’t know until he sees it, and to be fair, pickings are slim. Heavy textbooks from the last school year, already outdated and replaced by new editions. Stationery, as if Junpei doesn’t have enough already. Nothing here is useful to him, nothing here won’t cause a twinge of sadness every time he looks at it. Still, he owes it to himself to take something, anything in remembrance. If Mitsuru won’t preserve Minato’s memory, he will.

“Forget I said anything.”

It is too hard to stay in this room, this dorm. Without saying bye to Mitsuru, he slinks out.


	6. The Lights Inside This Room Don't Flicker, Part 2

Junpei’s reward for breaking habit and waking up an hour earlier the normal to meet the movers is a text message, equal parts apologia and excuse. Traffic, weather, whatever. They’d be late. He slumps in the foyer’s couch. He would play his portable console to pass the time, but he’s finished his entire library of games on it. Bored and annoyed, he stands up from the couch that he’s gotten used to lazing about in, paces in circles, sits back down, repeats. Still, the movers refuse to arrive.

To give himself something to do, he goes for a last wander around the mansion he has called home for the past year. He isn’t looking forward to seeing his drunk father again, but he can’t stay here either. Everything reminds him of Minato. The control room where they’d talked over missions, the vending machines they’d kicked whenever one failed to dispense the ginger beer, it all churns his heart, and worse than it ever had in the aftermath of Shinji’s death. It was hard for him to imagine he had so much fun for so long in the Gekkoukan dorms, ignorant of the coming disaster that would poison the best year of his life.

A few minutes of aimless wandering, and Junpei finds himself back on the boys’ floor of the dorm.

He forces his eyes to Minato’s door. Mourners come through every day, though there are less and less of them with each passing week. For the first time since Minato’s death, nobody is standing outside it, holding flowers or adding to the growing pile of useless memorabilia that will be disposed of soon.

Junpei takes unsteady steps towards the closed door, slow and deliberate. Each step increases his apprehension. The whole dormitory is silent. That room is too silent. A dead room without anyone inside it.

Metres away from Minato’s door, a surge of adrenalin courses through Junepi’s body and he shuts his eyes and turns away. When he opens his eyes again, he finds himself staring at another former occupant’s door.

Junpei swallows. He has never been inside Shinji’s room. With a final glance at Minato’s closed door, he bolts towards Shinji’s. Out of habit, he knocks, because it feels right.

“Didn’t know ya well, but wish I did, Shinji-san.”

He pushes the door open, only to be stunned at how barren it is. The bed covers are ironed flat, there is nothing on Shinji’s desk, and there isn’t even a leftover bit of hardened sticky tack on the wall where a poster would’ve hung. There is no indication that Shinji lived here, save for the nameplate on the door.

“Would be nice if you’d left us some stuff to remember you by.”

“Akihiko-senpai and Minato-senpai have them.”

Somehow Ken had snuck up behind without him noticing. The boy is leaning against the door frame, equally morose.

“After Shinji-senpai died, I came into his room and stared at his things. I got comfortable in here to the point I started living in his room. Eventually, Akihiko-senpai accused me of wasting time and took most of his stuff away.”

Junpei looks away. He forces out a bitter “That so?”, the words charring his lips. “Akihiko better have put ‘em to good use.”

Ken shrugs. “It was teenager stuff. Dumbells, violent DVDs and the like. Minato-senpai took his axe and his clothes for some reason.”

“Why?”

“Dunno. I thought it was weird. They never hung out all that much.”

Junpei has a vision of Shinji’s clothes sitting alone in Minato’s cupboard. It occurs to him that Minato wouldn’t want Shinji’s belongings disposed of. Those clothes were expensive.

“They’re probably still in Minato’s room. Let’s check it out.”

“Huh?”

He seizes the boy’s arm and drags him out Shinji’s room. “Shinji-senpai was your pal, right? Come on.”

“Ow, ow! Don’t squeeze my arm that hard, Junpei-senpai!”

Junpei draws a quivering breath as he faces Minato’s door again. Mercifully, it is still unguarded, save for the artefacts parked in front. Squeezing Ken’s arm harder, he flings Minato’s door open. The room is miserable and dark as he left it. The curtains are closed.

“Let’s find Shinji’s stuff.”

“You c-can’t!”

Junpei heads straight for Minato’s closet, tears it open, and is greeted with Shinjiro’s long red coat on a hanger. A grey beanie is neatly folded into the pocket. He yanks the items onto the floor.

“Junpei-senpai!” Ken protests.

Junpei dives under Minato’s bed next.

“An axe, right? Don’t tell me he sold it to the cops-”

His voice trails off. There is no axe, but there is a crate. Inside it, games of the same portable console that Junpei owns.

His empty games backlog creeps into mind.

“It’s not as if he’s gonna complain. ‘Sides, who was it that gave him _Innocent Sin Online_?” Junpei pulls the crate from under the bed. “Video games don’t deserve to go unplayed. Ha!”

He peers over Minato’s collection, small as it was. All single-player games.

Junpei pulls his backpack off his shoulder and begins shovelling the games into the bag. Finally, something to alleviate the boredom of moving out. He wiggles one of the borrowed items. “I’ll finish these for you, old buddy,” he says to the walls.

Ken watches him from the corner of the room, mortified.

“Go on. Money, clothes, what else do you want?” He prods Shinji’s clothes towards the terrified boy. “You can keep them, you know. Not as if he’s gonna complain.” Junpei wiggles his eyebrows, feeling a manic grin forming on his face.

“You’ll keep nothing, Amada-kun.”

The last game tumbles from Junpei’s grasp at the voice. The Empress strides inside, eyes blazing. Ken shrinks up against the wall, trembling.

“You’re a-awake early,” Junpei stutters, though the bags under Mitsuru’s eyes told him that “awake” was the wrong term. Licking his lips, he musters a feeble protest of:

“There’s nothing wrong with what I’m doing.”

“These aren’t yours!”

“Right back at you,” Junpei pants. He’s never spoken back to her like this before, not when he was so overmatched intellectually. It isn’t a matter of facts, but of feelings, and this time, Junpei knows that he isn’t doing anything wrong. She has as much right to decide what happened with Minato’s stuff as he does. “I’ll keep his memory alive, even if you won’t, even if it hurts me to do it.”

A tear drops onto the carpet. In the silence of the room, it makes a loud impact. It takes Junpei a moment to realise it is his.

Shame washes over him. Here he is, thronging through his friend’s possessions like a rat in a dumpster. He knows memory has nothing to do with why he made a beeline for Minato’s games.

“Y’know, I thought maybe you need help cleaning up this junkpile. I mean, look at all this.” Junpei feels his eyes watering, wet trails burning scars into his unshaven cheek. He grabs one of the papers left on Minato’s desk. “A monk’s tag. Where did he get this shit? Damn hoarder. And here! A thank-you note, addressed to a Tanaka-san. Who’s Tanaka, and why-” His eyes bulge at the letter. “How many millions in a donation?”

Mitsuru rips it out his hands before he can finish reading it.

“Iori, I don’t need to remind you to respect the dead’s belongings. Go downstairs and wait for the mover’s van. Please?”

Tears are forming in her eyes too, stifling the final words of resistance threatening to slide out of his mouth.

“Okay.”

He looks around Minato’s dusty and gloomy room for the last time. Ken has already fled. Junpei pulls his cap’s brim over his eyes, and hunches over in an imitation of a bow.

Ignoring Mitsuru’s sharp inhale, he leans over Minato’s bed to pluck the 2009 calendar off the wall. It is marked with important dates; meetings with friends, exams, holidays, full moons.

“What I said yesterday, I meant it,” he whispers. “I wanted something to remember him by. So you can’t stop me from taking this, at least. Sorry, Mitsuru-senpai.”

As Junpei steps over Shinji’s sad and dusty clothes, he tips his backpack over. Minato’s games fall to the floor. His shuffle out of the room turns into a jog outside the door, then a sprint down the hallway. He hopes he is fast enough to outrun Mitsuru’s sobs.

* * *

Back in the dorm’s foyer, Junpei fishes his handheld console out of his many boxes, trying not to think about what had just happened. He sits on the couch to replay one of his old fighting games, but the battery indicator is blinking a minute into his game.

“Well, whatever.” He shoves it back into his pocket.

Someone knocks on the door, and he bounds over to it, hoping it is the movers.

The door opens before he can reach it, and Akihiko steps inside, back from his morning run. He looks more worn than usual. Disappointed, Junpei lets Akihiko push past him before plopping himself back on the couch as Akihiko makes his way to the staircase.

“Everything alright with you?” Since Minato’s death, his husky drawl sounds more strained every time he talks.

 _“Magnifique_.”

Akihiko squints at him.

“All Mitsuru-senpai does is guard the door. You know the one. Thought she’d have better things to do than daydream about how she’s gonna burn all his shit.”

Akihiko’s shoulders sag. He places a hand on the staircase’s guardrail. “I’m sure she doesn’t need more reminders of Minato now,” he says as he pads softly upstairs.

“Do you think she burned all her dad’s shit when he died?” Junpei calls out. Akihiko’s footfalls turn into stomps.

Junpei brings his hand back to his handheld. He makes to turn it on again, but remembers it is out of battery.


	7. The Lights Inside This Room Don't Flicker, Part 3

“Whether we know it or not, Minato Arisato touched our lives in so many ways as an exemplar of our school’s values, our sporting achievements, our academic capabilities. It is not easy to list such an extensive list. Kendo champion. Artist. Were he alive today, he would be dux of the school for topping the exam rankings last year.”

The first few lines were the hardest to say, and Mitsuru’s delivery was far too shaky for her perfectionist self. Surely she is allowed that, given how personal funerals could get. And this was her second eulogy in twelve months. Still, she presses on, injecting more force into her delivery:

“None of those are what we remember him for. Today I speak of Arisato Minato, not as a fellow student or a dormmate, but as a friend.”

“He was a kind boy who pushed his ailing body to watch movies with each one of his friends – our friends – over last summer’s holidays. He was a rock that we could lean on in times of emotional turmoil. He was not a natural leader by any means, but personal circumstances made him one, and he rose to every occasion.”

Her nervousness dissipates with every word, and she autopilots the rest of her rehearsed speech. When she finishes, she sags back onto her bathroom’s floor in relief, gazing at the defeated face in the mirror.

Each repetition of her speech was stronger than the last, but she only had two days until she had to give the real eulogy at Minato’s funeral. She needed more time. Even one practice run through her address took every bit of emotional strength.

She vows to steel herself again. Gekkoukan’s Empress could ill-afford another premature departure mid-speech like she had at her graduation. The Kirijo reputation couldn’t take another hit of that kind before people started questioning her mettle.

How would she resolve that?

An idea comes to her. Climbing back to her feet, Mitsuru reaches under the sink and rifles through the supplies. She finds what she’s looking for when it tumbles out onto the linen floor: a roll of a green garbage bags.

* * *

 

It hurts to stand around here, but she does so anyway, knowing it wouldn’t stop the churning of her heart, or the pressure around the sides of her skull. Mitsuru clenches her fist, nails punching holes through the garbage bag in her hand.

“Oh.”

She is too tired to get a new one.

Yamagishi and Takeba refused to help clean out Minato’s room. Even Aigis had declined, and Koromaru slunk away with a whine, tail between his legs. All her speeches about the need for closure yielded zero helpers for this dreaded task. It could easily be done by her army of hired subordinates, but this task was something she needed to do for herself. When her father died, she couldn’t bring herself to throw away anything of his, and his clothes, his massage chair, his toothbrush were left undisturbed to collect dust and mould. Eventually, the butlers and maids cleared out his rooms, throwing away anything that wasn’t useful, and letting the lawyers have at the rest while Mitsuru remained in a daze for weeks.

Thankfully, she recovered in time to demand they spare some mementos of her father, photos and sentimental postcards and watches and jewellery with childhood memories attached to them, his gifts to her from his various travels. Those were too hard to keep by her bedside after a few weeks, with the shine of gloss and metal endlessly taunting Mitsuru when she was alone in her room; _you failed to save your father_. She soon demanded her servants to remove the trinkets and keep them off Kirijo property. Where those trinkets were now, she didn’t know.

The best she could do for the other ex-SEES members was to spare them that same pain. It wasn’t going to be a hard task in this case, for Minato left nothing behind except his school stationery. Even his SEES weapons were missing. He’d probably thrown them out after defeating Nyx.

Sighing, Mitsuru opens the curtains. The spring sunlight floods inside like water that has been held back by a dam for too long, eager to fill every corner of the room.

The first of Minato’s property to go are the loose teacher’s handouts and assignment drafts on his desk. She grabs a handful, dropping the scrunched paper into the garbage bag.

Next to go are the movie posters above his bed. They were lined up in a perfectly straight row, all anime series that had aired throughout last year, a timeline of 2009’s biggest hits. _The Depression of Kuzumiya Garuhi_ , _TotalMetal Alchemist, Magic Tale, Eden of the West._ The glossy sort of things you could tear out of library magazines.

“That’s what you watched?” She’d spent a precious holiday watching foreign films with him at Gekkoukan’s film festival, Screen Shot. Anime didn’t seem like the thing he’d be into. Nevertheless, here was proof that his tastes were as conventional as the rest of the otaku at school.

“I hope you got to watch all those shows to completion.”

Mitsuru leans over the bed to pick at the corner of the _Garuhi_ poster. As she did so, she overbalances, and plunges headfirst into Minato’s pillows. The paper rips as it slips out of her fingers. Mortified, she pulls herself off his pillow to inspect the damage. A chunk has been ripped off the bottom corner of the poster. Mitsuru feels as if she has killed something.

She decides to ignore the poster for now. Tearing it down could come later when she had the proper tools.

As she combs through his room, she finds herself making excuses to leave everything where it was. She can’t dispose of anything; not the video games, the clothes, the monk’s tag or the Gourmet Licence on his desk. They are evidence that he had a life beyond SEES, a life the other dorm members never saw. She wonders how Minato got those items, what stories those unassuming bits of paper could tell.

There is a sharp crack, and the ground under her feet becomes uneven. Under her foot is a cracked plastic UMD case.

It was one of the games Iori was trying to steal. With a disgusted click of the tongue, she kicks the case back under the bed, toppling over another stack of cases hidden under the bed. Sighing, she kneels down to stack up all the cases again. As she peeks under the bed, she sees more plastic cases taped to its underside. Games – of course – but also CDs and DVDs of various anime and American movies. There is even a blue case amidst all the black and grey. More notably, the words on the spine of the blue case are French.

 _L'Histoire d'Adèle V,_ it reads _._

Mitsuru peels it off from under the mattress. That was one of the films she’d watched with Minato during Screen Shot.

Why would he have a Blu-Ray of this? Especially foreign language movies, which would have to be imported at extra cost from Europe. And when he saw the movie with her in that cinema, he didn’t look too interested.

She scrabbles for more under his bed, pulling out various items. A superhero keychain, a cactus, and soap. Candles. Wrapping paper. A stack of birthday cards and envelopes.

“You don’t make this easy for me, do you?” she murmurs.

Mitsuru drops the near-empty garbage bag onto the floor, and the bag’s gaping entrance deflates and collapses in on itself, as if it doesn’t want to devour anything else in the room either.

* * *

 

She no longer finds herself gasping for air when she delivers Minato’s eulogy in front of his casket.

Since last night, Mitsuru was daring enough to make a few last-minute alterations to her speech, which would be anathema to her past self. She doesn’t care. Her mind has washed away the uncertainty, clarity cutting through her doubt and piercing the clouds suffocating her judgement. After so many weeks of doubt, Mitsuru had realised what she needed to do. She couldn’t alienate the audience of hundreds with her tales of fighting Shadows, but the changes she’d made to the speech would resonate with SEES in particular.

“His influence will remain with us. So let us preserve what we have left of Minato-kun in the physical form, because we will need proof that he lived, that everything we went through wasn’t an illusion.”

Her eyes fall on Junpei in the front row. He is crying, but he does not look away.


	8. The Dying Bury The Dead

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers for Maya's Social Link.

“Your eyes are red, Toriumi-san.” Ekoda comments.

Toriumi wants to slap him. She’s only just mustered up the will to return the faculty office for yet another long school year - a few weeks after her favourite student was buried - and the old bastard is already criticising her.

“Two students dead in six months. I’ll never understand how everyone else is this stoic. People should be resigning, complaining about dangerous work environments and demanding pay rises.”

At the same time, she can’t help but feel relief as she sags into her office chair. Arisato-kun knew all her opinions on her colleagues. How Ekoda wouldn’t stop nagging, how Kanou had fake tits. Of all the people she could’ve met in that online game, it had to be one of her students. Typical, astronomical bad luck. Imagine what the students would say if word got out that she had a student for an online boyfriend, or worse, substituted a faceless gamer for a therapist. Teenagers could be mean, especially towards single women at her age. Toriumi knows she deserves the stigma; she’s gossipy, mean, the type of woman to make a stranger carry all her burdens from work, and then take solace upon hearing that said stranger carried their shared secret to the grave.

She goes about her work as passionless as ever. It made no difference how long she was away from her desk. Routine is as easy to slip into as the pyjamas she throws on once she returns home from work, just before she collapses into her other swivel chair in front of her other computer.

“I believe this is your class’s homework.” Ekoda’s voice crashes through her thoughts. He leans close over her shoulder to drop a stack of paper on the desk. “These were on my desk for some reason.”

“My mistake,” she mutters.

“Is this going to be the same routine as last year?”

_If you’d hurry up and die, maybe not, you old bastard._

“Sorry.”

Ekoda sighs, but he doesn’t return to his desk. Pressure builds up at the base of her skull.

“I don’t know why you keep coming to work,” he murmurs. “It’s so obvious you’d rather be anywhere else.”

“I was a good teacher when I first got the job,” Toriumi protests reflexively, “I wanted to help kids, you know. I remember when I liked everyone here. Staff and children.”

“You must have a longer memory than I do.” Ekoda walks back to his desk, oblivious to Toriumi rolling her eyes. Once Ekoda is gone, Toriumi returns her attention to the pile of unmarked homework atop her desk, a scowl forming across her face. _This_ was the sort of thing that could turn any idealistic teacher jaded. Parents’ high expectations, the same old colleagues adding grey strands year after year, the same mistakes and corrections on the tests, the kids’ simple errors repeated year after year after year. But the students were the most interesting people in school because they learned and grew. Then they graduated, and went on to have fulfilling careers and a chance to chase their dreams.

Meanwhile, she was trapped in the bottom of a whirlpool, and with nothing to grab onto to help her escape, not even a video game now that _Innocent Sin Online’s_ servers were closing. She’d forced herself to stay away from MMOs since Arisato died. What if she spilled her guts to another random again? Last time, it might have been a quiet Gekkoukan student, but knowing her luck, it could be someone malicious out to ruin her career the next time she got too used to venting through her keyboard. Even with that fear in mind, she was already wavering like in all her other new year’s resolutions.

No, it was best to leave her gaming habits in the past and find another passion, one that didn’t involve grinding for experience in the hopes of a far-off promotion, or a perpetual shortage of funds.

Peeking to make sure nobody else was around her, she opens her personal email account where she’d forwarded a log of all her online conversations with the boy she knew as Tatsuya. Ever since he’d died, she’d been going through the whole log weekly, chuckling at his good humour in the face of her unrelenting negativity. One of his supportive replies after another long-winded rant about grinding in MMOs caught her eye.

_There’s more life in the world beyond the online._

She’d dismissed him with a torrent of emoticons at the time. He was right, though. She needed a substitute for the bottomless MMO pit and the vacuum it had created in her life. Maybe sports. Lawn bowls was for old ladies, but she was a decent tennis player back in the day, not to mention all the gyms in the area. And hadn’t Terauchi suggested they set up a mah-jong after-school club? Hell, if she couldn’t let go of video games, societies for retro video game enthusiasts had been popping up recently. She had fond memories of playing with her brother on the Siiga Jupiter back in her teens. Those days of gaming were far more social than her time on _Innocent Sin._

“Toriumi-san.”

Toriumi cringes. Ekoda’s fish eyes are still looming at her again from over the divider. She forces the smirk back into her mouth and snatches the top paper from the homework pile.

This one belonged to Iori Junpei. One of Arisato’s friends, and a real dumbass without Arisato to whisper answers in his ear. She instinctively prepares to draw crosses down the page. But as she reads his homework, she is stunned. Despite the messy handwriting, his work isn’t bad at all. There are still careless errors in grammar and punctuation, but she wasn’t about to accuse him of dragging down Japan’s literacy rate anymore.

“Miracles do happen, huh?”

Arisato’s academic spirit had apparently rubbed onto Iori this year. She makes a mental note to keep a closer eye on him over their next few classes. If even Iori could show determination to improve his grades a little after his best friend’s death, she owed it to him to facilitate his development further. Maybe she could feel like she accomplished something worthwhile with her nagging.

Toriumi flips open her timetable with enthusiasm she hasn’t felt in a long time. Iori’s class is first thing after tomorrow’s lunch.

She draws “B” in the corner of Iori’s homework and circles it, punctuating it with a smiley face.


	9. The Game Is To Be Sold, Not To Be Told

“That good, huh?”

“Ya don’t know, Iori-kun? It was one of the best single-player games released last decade. In fact, I’d say it was one of the last great single-player-only games, since they ain’t so popular nowadays. A great game for a frickin’ handheld, I tell you what. It sold literally a dozen copies though, so I ain’t seen 'em out in the wild. Where’d ya find it, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Got it from a friend. He was a bit of a collector.”

“Was?”

Junpei tugs the front of his cap, but he stops himself from pulling it over his eyes.


End file.
